Design, Download And Print Your House With WikiHouse

The next revolution in architecture comes without the architect. WikiHouse is the first open source platform for house design. It enables anybody, including non-design professionals, to design houses with Google’s free 3D design software SketchUp and instantly print and build them. Design your own dream house with the help of the crowd and a plywood printer.

WikiHouse calls itself an Open Community Construction set. Its aim is to make it possible for almost anyone, regardless of their formal skills, to download, print and build structures. Although it’s still a fresh initiative, WikiHouse could change how the relations between designers and clients work. It offers affordable houses that can be made suited to anyone’s needs. This is how the open source do-it-yourself house printing platform works:

“Download houses and components which are created and shared by an open community of designers from around the world. Individual parts can be combined or adapted using the free program Google Sketchup. Click ‘Make this House’ from within Google SketchUp and WikiHouse generates a complete set of milling drawings from your model, which can be used by a CNC cutter to fabricate the house parts.”

Finally all 18 mm plywood pieces, which are available at your local DIY shop, can be put together as if it’s an IKEA bed. The constructed structure will be ready to clad, glaze, wire, plumb and finish, as PSFK concludes. The first WikiHouse will be constructed in South Korea at the Gwangju Design Biennial 2011.

More than two years ago we featured this wicked ‘invisible’ tree hotel room by Videgard Hansson Arkitekter in the Swedish town of Harads. Their creation is part of the Tree Hotel, a hotel that consists of five extraordinary rooms in the woods of northern Sweden. Dezeen just featured one of the other rooms of the hotel: a huge…

Internet provider Terra collaborated with DDB Mexico to launch a campaign that rewards you for disposing your dog’s droppings with free Wi-Fi. Talk about a treat, and encouragement of good behaviour for the tethered ‘always connected to our mobile devices’ individual. Instead of special signs or the threat of a fine, this pilot tries to make to those poo-littered parks in Mexico (a little) cleaner with positive reinforcement…

“Leave your wallet at home!” This could be the slogan for the bartering and swapping markets that have flooded several cities in Europe over the past few years. Moving beyond the traditional market idea, swapping markets are advocates of an ‘exchange — without-money’ process which has recently gained popularity in the light of global economic…

Doing research for the upcoming Pop-Up City book, we came across a great ‘Pop-Up City avant la lettre’ project by Jean-Louis Chanéac (1931-1993). In 1971, the French architect installed a parasite bedroom on the façade of a regular modernist residential apartment block in Geneva, Switzerland. Chanéac’s ‘parasitic sucking cells’ are mobile, evolutionary and a complete contrast to the host building’s architectural style in every sense possible.